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Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Anonymous Launches New DDoS Attack Against RIAA

The Anonymous hacktivist collective has launched new distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), after the trade group sued LimeWire for 75 trillion dollars.

LimeWire, one of the oldest peer-to-peer file sharing applications, was discontinued last October after RIAA won a permanent injunction forcing its creator, Lime Wire LLC, to disable the program's searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or all of its functionality.

The LimeWire shutdown is credited by market research group NPD with a drop of nearly 50% in the number of U.S. users who engage in Internet piracy.

Earlier this month, on behalf of music labels, RIAA filed a statutory damage claim of $150,000 for each of the 11,000 songs illegally shared by LimeWire users.

RIAA's request for what is a total of $75 trillion was rejected by Judge Kimba Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York as "absurd."

In his ruling, Judge Wood said the claim "offends the canon that we should avoid endorsing statutory interpretations that would lead to absurd results."

Despite RIAA's request being denied, the Anonymous collective, which fights for freedom of information and the abolishment of what it sees as draconian copyright laws, mounted a DDoS attack against the trade association's website.

"The RIAA are at it again, and thus, the time for action has come. What shenangans have they cooked up this time? More ambitious than suing children for millions of dollars, they have escalated their tactics.

"They are suing Limewire for 75 Trillion dollars, twelve times more money than the U.S. National debt. That is the actual amount that they can sue Limewire for based on our current bull**** [censored] legal system," the group writes in a call for DDoS posted online.